The New COO Mandate in Financial Services

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By Todd L. Cromwell, CPA, CGMA, Director

Key Takeaways

Financial services chief operating officer (COO) role now drives enterprise performance — embedding artificial intelligence (AI) into workflows to boost productivity, control effectiveness and service quality across banking, insurance and payments.
Operational resilience is a core mandate as Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) and Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) rules require service mapping, third-party oversight and tested recovery to withstand cyber and technology disruptions.
Core workflows are being redesigned using generative AI (GenAI), data unification and automation — improving underwriting, fraud defense and advisor productivity while enforcing governance, risk management and regulatory compliance.

Drawing on PwC’s 29th Global CEO Survey and current public disclosures from JPMorganChase, Citi, AIG, Visa, BlackRock, European Insurance and Occupational Pensions Authority (EIOPA) and the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), one point is hard to miss: the financial services chief operating officer (COO) job has moved to the center of enterprise performance. PwC found CEOs are less confident in near-term growth, are more exposed to cyber and technology disruption and still spend nearly half of their time on issues inside a one-year horizon. Yet, that same survey argues that companies moving faster on reinvention are outperforming slower peers. In financial services, that reinvention is being pushed through operations.

That changes the job description. The COO is no longer just running the machine. In banking, insurance, payments and asset and wealth management, the role now sits at the intersection of technology deployment, service continuity, regulatory response and productivity. The firms pulling ahead are not treating operations as a support function. They are using it as competitive infrastructure.

1. AI Has Moved from Pilot to Operating Model

The clearest evidence is in banking. In her shareholder letter, JPMorganChase COO Jennifer Piepszak said the bank’s software engineers are seeing up to 10% to 20% productivity gains through AI coding assistants and that the firm rolled out its Large Language Model (LLM) Suite to more than 200,000 employees in a controlled environment designed to protect customer and company data. Citi’s third-quarter 2025 results show the same direction of travel: application retirement, reduced manual intervention in regulatory reporting, roughly 7 million uses of its enterprise GenAI tools, year to date and about 1 million automated code reviews. That is not innovation theater. It is operations using AI to compress cycle times, reduce friction and improve control.

For financial services COOs, that is the standard now. AI must show up in throughput, service quality, control effectiveness or developer productivity. If it does not move one of those levers, it is still just a science project.

2. Resilience Is Now a Live Operating Requirement

Regulators are making the point even more bluntly. EIOPA says the European Union’s Digital Operational Resilience Act was put into effect on January 17, 2025 and is designed to ensure banks, insurers, investment firms and other financial entities can withstand, respond to and recover from Information and Communications Technology (ICT) disruptions. These disruptions are unplanned events and include cyberattacks, hardware failures or human error. In the United Kingdom, the FCA says firms in scope had until March 31, 2025 to ensure they could keep important business services within their impact tolerances. In March 2026, the FCA also finalized operational incident and third-party reporting rules that will apply from March 18, 2027. The message is plain: service mapping, testing, third-party ovesight and recovery playbooks are no longer nice-to-haves.

That is why resilience now sits squarely on the COO agenda. In a digital financial system, the question is no longer whether disruption will happen. The question is whether the institution can absorb it without losing customers, breaching obligations or damaging confidence.

3. Core Industry Workflows Are Being Rewired

Insurance shows the same pattern. AIG’s 2024 annual report says the company achieved $450 million in exit run-rate savings, strengthened operational capabilities in underwriting and claims and invested heavily in data and digital strategies. At AIG’s 2025 Investor Day, the company said GenAI is reshaping the future of insurance, particularly in underwriting and claims. That tells you where insurance COOs are spending their attention: faster underwriting, better claims execution, cleaner data and workflow redesign that can scale without weakening governance.

Payments leaders are focused on are a different, but equally stubborn problem: fraud and ecosystem risk. Visa’s Fall 2025 threat report says payment security is being reshaped by industrialization of fraud, synthetic authenticity, control erosion and third-party vulnerability. Visa explicitly argues for a shift from institution-centric security to ecosystem-wide resilience. For payments COOs, that means fraud prevention, vendor oversight, intelligence sharing and cross-functional incident response have all become operating priorities, not simply risk-management talking points.

In asset and wealth management, the emphasis is on data unification and advisor productivity. BlackRock’s public Aladdin materials frame the platform as a common data language that enables scale, insights and business transformation. Aladdin Copilot is pitched around productivity, efficiency and sound governance. Aladdin Wealth emphasizes advisor efficiency and scale through connected digital systems, while Aladdin Data Cloud emphasizes built-in governance and controls. That illustrates a strong emphasis on current COO focus in asset management: reduce workflow friction, improve decision support and make data usable across the enterprise without surrendering control.

4. The Agenda Is Now Unmistakable

Taken together, the public record points to a much tighter COO mandate in financial services. The job is now centered on five things: (1) AI with controls, (2) resilience of important business services, (3) simplification and regulatory remediation, (4) fraud and cyber defense and (5) modernization of revenue-critical workflows. That is where the pressure mounts. It is also where the upside can be found.

PwC’s 29th Global CEO Survey got the broader point right. Firms moving faster on reinvention are outperforming more cautious peers. In financial services, that reinvention is not happening in abstract strategy decks. It is happening within operations. The firms that understand that will build a real edge. The ones that do not will keep discovering, the hard way, that operational weakness eventually shows up in growth, margin, trust and valuation.

5. A Disciplined Path Forward for COOs

What to do next is straightforward. COOs should identify the few business services and operating processes that matter most, assign clear ownership and attach hard measures around speed, quality, control and economic impact. From there, they should stress-test third-party dependencies, reduce manual workarounds, rationalize overlapping systems and make sure AI efforts are tied to real workflow improvement rather than experimentation for its own sake. Just as important, COOs need a tighter operating cadence with finance, risk, technology and compliance so decisions get made faster and accountability is harder to dodge. In this environment, the winning play is not doing more. It is doing the right things with more discipline.

How PKF O’Connor Davies Helps COOs Tackle Top-of-mind Challenges

At PKF O’Connor Davies, we help financial services COOs address the issues now sitting at the top of the operating agenda: resilience, regulatory scrutiny, technology modernization, the governance demands created by AI and automation, transaction readiness and the constant pressure to improve control and efficiency at the same time. Our financial services professionals bring decades of experience across banking, capital markets, trading, investment management and investment banking, with backgrounds spanning major CPA firms, Wall Street institutions, regulatory bodies, investor roles and the C-suite. That perspective allows us to support COOs where it matters most, including corporate strategy, policies and procedures, IPO readiness, mergers and acquisitions, regulatory reporting, tax compliance and structuring, cyber and data privacy reviews, internal audit and staff augmentation.

For firms that need support deeper in the operating engine room, we also help run the machinery that keeps the business controlled, scalable and investor-ready. Our services include middle- and back-office operations, fund and investor accounting, multi-pronged reconciliations, prime broker and custodian reconciliations, NAV, waterfall and carry calculations, management and incentive fee verification, shadow accounting, AML/KYC, investor services, due diligence, performance reporting, valuation, audit readiness, financial statement reporting under GAAP and IFRS and outsourced CFO support.

Backed by PKF International’s network of more than 400 offices in 150 countries, PKF O’Connor Davies brings accounting, tax, valuation and advisory capabilities together at the point where strategy meets execution.

Stay tuned for more insights, including an upcoming piece on implementing AI workflows strategically.